Sunday, Lemmy and Me, Part Three
More flashbacks to my epic encounter with Motörhead's legendary frontman
Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!
Our December celebration of Lemmy continues with Part Three of my truly expansive 2002 interview with the Motörhead mainman, offered up here as a special Christmas treat for my paid subscribers. If you’re a fan of Motörhead, or if you just dig deep-diving interviews with legendary music figures, I guarantee that this will be more than worth your $5 monthly subscription.
And if you’ve missed any of it so far, you can catch up on Part One here:
And Part Two here:
And there’s at least two more installments of this to go!
Also, as a paid JTL subscriber, you’ll have full listening access to CROSSED CHANNELS, the monthly music podcast I recently launched with
. We discuss The Jam in Episode One — and we have episodes on The Sex Pistols and The Replacements on the way!
And now, back to the Bel-Age Hotel in West L.A., where the Jack and Cokes are flowing like wine, along with Lemmy’s surprisingly vivid memories and unsurprisingly forthright opinions on everything from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to his band’s classic Ace of Spades LP…
When Motörhead started, you guys fell in with the punk bands pretty quickly.
We were doing odd gigs. The first gig we ever played, we suported Greenslade!
Weren’t they a folk band?
No, no; Greenslade were one of them “power organ” bands.
What, like Procol Harum?
Oh, no, worse than that. Procol Harum actually did a couple of good songs. Greenslade were kind of like Yes — a lot of fiddling about, Rush, all that bollocks. Mikkey [Dee, Motörhead drummer] likes all that. He’s a great Rush fan.
Rush supported Hawkwind on one of our American tours. So did Aerosmith! And Frank Marino — when he found out I’d worked for Hendrix, my god, you should have seen him! He had me pinned against the wall for about 45 minutes, like, “How did he comb his hair?” I said, “You’re supposed to know — you’re the reincarnation, aren’t you? You’re supposed to know this stuff!” [laughs] He didn’t know shit! I tell you what he did know — he did play like he was one step on from Hendrix when he stopped. He did play like that, I’ve gotta give him that.
Robin Trower was also doing a similarly Hendrix-y sort of thing at that time.
Yeah, he was very similar, that’s right. The first time I saw Marino, we had a day off in Toledo, and I went to see him play at the same place we were playing the next day. He was really like fucking Hendrix; nobody else was then — a lot of people were trying, but nobody else was coming close. Because Hendrix was the best guitarist you’re ever gonna see. And I’m so sorry for you that you’ll never see him onstage, because onstage is where he lived.
Obviously, all I’ve been able to see are his various filmed performances.
Yeah, well, Monterey’s the best one; Monterey’s, like, insane. And the one in Berkeley, with the headband, where he plays “Johnny B. Goode” [Jimi Plays Berkeley], that’s not bad. There’s a lot of filler in that, but “Johnny B. Goode”’s pretty good, you know. But Monterey’s the one, yeah.
But he used to fuck up such a lot, you know. I mean, some days, he’d go onstage, play three songs, and go, “Uhhh, don’t sound right.” He’d walk off, and that was it! He used to stomp his fuzzbox, and it’d be all over the stage, springs and little bits. We’d be there backstage, trying to put one back together out of three of them that he’d stomped. And we used to have to hold the amps up while he fucked them with his guitar…